This is true, and I have
heard it many times. My automatic thought is that the suburbs are more diverse,
which is also true. I read it pointed out in an article many years ago, and it
has only become more true since then. This is something I rejoice in, but I
also acknowledge that a lot of people think this area is trashy. Maybe seeing
different color faces and hearing different music, seeing clothing with
specific cultural and religious associations... maybe that reinforces it for
them.

Nonetheless, he mentioned
all the white faces, and then he talked about the Chinese Massacre of 1871, the
largest mass lynching in American history. A mob of 500 white and Latino
rioters ransacked buildings in Chinatown,
attacking and robbing many residents and torturing and killing 17 to 20 Chinese
immigrants. Eventually 10 of the rioters were brought to trial and 8 convicted,
but those convictions were overturned on a legal technicality.

This was also not
completely new to me. I believe it had come up both when I was studying history
and violence in the American West, and then came up again when I was trying to
figure out what Bret Harte was doing with that one poem, that eventually turned
out to just be failed satire. (And he was more focused on San Francisco, but when you aren't finding good answers the
search tends to expand.)

I don't know why it was
different this time. Maybe it was because I heard about it from someone who had
lived in Los
Angeles and who had some Chinese ancestry. Somehow, when I was walking in
downtown Portland a few hours later, it was different.

I found myself looking
for non-white faces. There were several, but there were so many more white
faces. It didn't look like a problem necessarily, unless someone gets in the
mood to start a lynch mob, and what were the odds of that happening? Except I had
also seen pictures of the torch-carrying mob in Charlottesville.

The big revelation for a
lot of men through #metoo has been wondering how women ever feel safe; how do
people of color ever feel safe?

This seems even more
pertinent in light of a recent incident on BART, where a white man verbally and
physically attacked Charles Wu, a man who is not white:

I can't blame anyone for
being scared in that situation; it was only in May that two men were killed and
another injured for standing up to a racist on my town's public transit system.
I am willing to think it's good that multiple riders contacted the police
(while holding on to some concerns over whether or not that would de-escalate the
situation).

It still bothers me that
there were more requests to calm down given to the person being attacked than
the attacker. It's nice that they all said how wrong it was after the scary guy
was gone, but it might have been more useful earlier.

It really bothers me that
the one white guy got up and moved away. In the article officials praised him
for removing himself from danger, but I can't help but think that for the
attacker it would be viewed as a tacit acceptance: yes, you can abuse this guy.
I won't stand in your way.

One of the best pieces of
advice I have seen recently is to figure out in advance how you are going to
react to different situations so that you don't freeze when it happens. I don't
want to freeze.

I also don't particularly
want to be attacked, but even more than that I do not want to be part of a
crowd that passively accepts the will of white supremacists -- whether it is a
deeply held ideology or just accepted as enough license to be abusive and
assert dominance -- I do not want to uphold that.

I realize this post -
from the title on down - may be causing a lot of discomfort. If you are feeling
that I am wrong or at least overstating, but you have continued reading, I
commend you.

Our country elected the
candidate most popular with the Nazis and KKK. There are other factors
contributing, but he still got a lot of votes and they were from mostly white
people and they were not a majority of poor people so there are no excuses
there. During the campaign hate crimes rose, and they are still rising. I can't
blame anyone who isn't white for getting nervous when they are surrounded by
whiteness.

That vote was an
important choice, but it is not the only choice. We choose what we laugh at,
what we awkwardly ignore, and what we call out, whether we do that humorously
or with clear non-verbal cues or with an actual statement.

We choose what legal
issues we care about and which ones we decide don't matter because they don't
affect us.

We choose what we
complain about. Some people only ever play devil's advocate, which is an
interesting choice in itself.

And we choose how we
react when faced with naked racism. I'd like to tell you that in this day and
age we're past having to worry about lynch mobs, but there are too many signs
that we're not.

But before that, there is
a lot of testing the water. There is name-calling and stereotyping and boundary
pressing of how much one can get away with. Resisting here may do the most
good. Maybe it can turn the tide.

We need to think about
it. We need to think about what we see and what we hear, and how we respond. We
need to think about the things that aren't in front of us but are still
happening.